A few days ago, it was rumoured that MediaTek would release a new SoC before October ends. Today, MediaTek has just revealed its new Helio P70 SoC, the successor to the Helio P60, which was announced earlier this year. The marketing focus this time around is on improved AI-related operations, subsequently improved camera performance and better gaming experience. Prima facie, the Helio P70 looks nearly identical to the P60. Let's take a look at its specifications.

The P70 support up to one 32MP camera or up to a 24MP+16MP paired configuration. There's an improved "deep-learning facial detection" method built in with up to 90% accuracy, "real-time human pose detection," beautification overlays, object and scene identification, and an advertised 18% power savings in the ISP compared to the P60. It also supports a handful of methods for HDR, PDAF, multi-frame noise reduction, MEMA 3DNR, and a list of other performance improvements in existing operations.

The P70 uses TSMC's 12nm FinFet node with eight cores total: four A73 cores at 2.1GHz and four A53 cores at 2.0 GHz. There's also an AI-purposed multicore APU at up to 5.25MHz, and a Mali-G72 MP3 GPU at up to a 900MHz clock. It provides a 13% improvement over the GPU in the P60. The P70 gets the same NeruoPilot platform and SDK compatibility with other machine learning systems like TensorFlow, Caffe, and TF Lite. The P70's WorldMode modem supports 4G LTE at up to 300Mb/s with dual-sim support.

MediaTek is targeting the Helio P70 at its existing market of mid-range devices priced in the $300-500 range. Its predecessor found itself mostly in $300-400 price range like the OPPO F9 Pro. It is very likely that the P70 will mostly end up in similar handsets, targeted and sold primarily in emerging markets such as India and China. It's in production as we speak, and we can find it in phones starting this November. It'll be interesting to see how the P70 holds up against the likes of the Qualcomm Snapdragon 660 and 710 in benchmarks and real-world use. MediaTek SoCs still have a lot of ground to cover before they can match their Qualcomm counterparts in performance, and we hope that the P70 helps bridge that gap a little.